Month: June 2009

As printed in the Guelph Mercury, June 25 2009: With the advent of summer, local food is on everyone’s lips — and increasingly also in their shopping baskets. It certainly is the trend of the moment, and one farmers are embracing wholeheartedly. So are communities that are launching farmers markets, new stores that are focusing […]

The following is part of an ongoing series of posts tracking Ontario’s foods and what’s currently in season. After what seemed like an endlessly cool and wet spring, the arrival of summer in Ontario also means the long awaited start of strawberry season. It’s an eagerly anticipated time of year in Ontario – one that […]

The Holland Marsh area north of Toronto was the setting for a farm tour with Toronto area food writers in early June. A group of about 30 food media and home economists – involved in everything from writing articles to recipe testing to authoring cook books – spent the day experiencing Ontario food and farms.

A gas station in Ottawa is the first in the world to sell fuel made with wheat straw, says a major petroleum company. Shell announced that this blended fuel includes 10% biofuel made from wheat stalks – known as cellulosic ethanol.

The federal government has developed a series of suggestions for Canadians to be more environmentally conscious. The tips – listed on a website called Take Action for the Environment – cover a variety of areas, but some of them, in my opinion, come directly from agriculture and represent things that farmers have been doing for […]

They’re calling for a mostly normal season this year – hurricane season, that is. And that’s a relief to many, not only those who live in traditional hurricane areas in the Caribbean and along the Atlantic coast, but also to those of us here in the Great White North otherwise known as Canada.

As printed in the Guelph Mercury, June 4 2009: We have attempted to tell our story for years — but for the most part, people haven’t been interested in food and farming. After all, from the average Canadian’s perspective, there was safe food and plenty of it, so what else was there to know? But […]

A lot of people have asked these questions and as consumers, we now have the chance to find out the answer – straight from Canada’s chicken farmers. Chicken Farmers of Canada has just launched a brand new blog – called Chicken Feeds – that will focus on all things chicken in Canada.

Corn uses too much water and too much fertilizer to produce, its critics often charge, making it a bad environmental choice. Yet millions of people around the world depend on corn as a staple of life – as food for themselves, as feed for their livestock and as a renewable fuel alternative. And that demand […]